Harding Loevner, an asset management company, released its “Global Developed Markets Equity Strategy” fourth-quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. International stock markets concluded the last quarter of 2024 on a negative note, although US stocks significantly surpassed the rest of the world, during the year and the quarter. The fund declined by -0.99% gross of fee in the fourth quarter compared to a -0.07% decline in the MSCI World Index. For the full year, the strategy rose 15.2%, lagging the benchmark’s 19.2% gain. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2024.
In its fourth quarter 2024 investor letter, Harding Loevner Global Developed Markets Equity Strategy emphasized stocks such as NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA). NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) offers graphics and compute and networking solutions. The one-month return of NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) was -9.66%, and its shares gained 15.67% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On April 3, 2025, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock closed at $101.80 per share with a market capitalization of $2.484 trillion.
Harding Loevner Global Developed Markets Equity Strategy stated the following regarding NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:
“For the full year, the composite’s underperformance was primarily due to poor stock choices in the US. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA), which we sold in the first quarter and repurchased in the fourth quarter, caused almost two-thirds of the strategy’s underperformance. We were hurt by our underweight as NVIDIA’s stock price soared during the first half of the year on the insatiable demand for the company’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which enable generative Al computing.
After ASML’s disappointing outlook led industry valuations to compress, we added a strong company back to the portfolio-NVIDIA.
There were two main reasons we sold NVIDIA last February (after holding the stock for more than five years). First, its biggest customers-data-center behemoths Amazon, Alphabet. Meta Platforms, and Microsoft-have been designing their own custom semiconductor chips, called application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS), that could eventually erode NVIDIA’s dominance. Second, it was unclear to us whether the adoption of Al by large enterprises will be as fast and meaningful as the optimistic views suggested…” (Click here to read the full text)
A close-up of a colorful high-end graphics card being plugged in to a gaming computer.
NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is in 5th position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 223 hedge fund portfolios held NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) at the end of the fourth quarter which was 193 in the previous quarter. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) reported another record quarter in fiscal Q4 2025 with $39.3 billion in revenues, representing a 78% year-over-year increase and 12% sequential growth. While we acknowledge the potential of NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as NVIDIA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
We covered NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in another article, where we shared the list of best innovative stocks to buy according to analysts. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 2024 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.